Snippet: Letting Go of Facebook ☇

Marius Masalar:

In truth, I could have given those up more easily had Facebook not also become the steward of Instagram. But leaving one without leaving the other isn’t just pointless from a privacy perspective, it also feels like delaying the inevitable drop of the other shoe. The ghosts that haunt Facebook have already possessed Instagram too, and they’ll leech its lifeblood just as readily.

A couple of years ago, I would have argued that Instagram is among the last bastions of pleasantness in social media. In many ways, it remains so today—the atmosphere is still mostly enjoyable. A focus on visuals makes it easier to maintain a sunny disposition, I suppose. […]

There’s a different sort of toxicity there, and it has to do with the increasing theatricality of the feed.

Aspirational artifice is the name of the game on the Instagram of 2019. Scrolling the feed is like wandering through a maze of motivational posters, humblebrags, and weirdly distorted perspectives on the people we choose to follow.

I feel like there’s been a lot of talk (not just on here) about severing ties with certain social networks. The general feel of Instagram has made it really difficult to completely abandon all Facebook properties. It’s a shame it couldn’t have stayed a standalone product or had been purchased by someone else.